I respect it when I hear someone clearly attempting a word they've only seen written

Up until recently, I thought that the US national park was pronounced "yo-semite", as if it was some sort of ghetto-slang used for greeting a Jewish person.

Doesn't mean it isn't cute/funny when it does happen, though. Just this week my SO pronounced chihuahua as "CHA-HOO-A-HOO-A" so I told them "you know this word, it's the taco bell dog" lol

Also dialects are a thing. The way a lot of words come out of my mouth has been culturally labeled as ignorant. I go out of my way to change my pronunciations at work so I get taken seriously, but I've been doing it less now that I'm accepted in that world. Maybe that caps how much farther I can go, but maybe I don't want to go further if it means continuing to act like people who sound like how I sound are less than

Pour one out for all my epi-tome homies

You should never mock someone who pronounces a word strangely: They might be from Reading.

Or... or you read it in the 3 word title of a meme. Doesn't matter, learned word.

It was embarrassingly recently that I realized segue and "segway" were the same word which I apparently didn't know how to spell.

Edit: BTW - the weird way that English words are spelled or pronounced - and why - is one of my favorrite nerd subjects. I love this thread so freaking much. And how RIGHT nearly everyone here SHOULD have been.

As a homeschooled kid with a big vocabulary I was largely not able to pronounce (more reading than talking), this is a sentiment I wish I'd heard earlier in life.

This was me with a number of words over the years, but most memorable "paradigm."

"Facade" caught me in high school.

Interestingly (to me), I have the opposite problem in Spanish. I've learned mostly through immersion, so when I see a Spanish word written down sometimes I'm like "Holy heck THAT'S how you spell carrot??" Spanish is a language where the spelling/pronounciation rules are really consistent, but it's still surprising to see some of these words without having ever thought of how they might be spelled. Toallas (towels) got me too.

Gif

Unless it's a YouTuber. Then they're possibly pronouncing it wrong so people will comment about their pronunciation and fuel the algorithm.

Me as a small children: I'll PRE-FACE this by saying...

Family: wait, what??

I did not feel honorable...

An-tea-queues

And rather ironically:

Kway instead of Queue --8th grade substitute teacher caught me on that one while reading aloud.

Yo sa mite for Yosemite is my worst one.

Segue still gets me. In my head I still pronounce it like rogue.

OK, so then I'm proud of the fact that I thought Hermione from the Harry Potter books was pronounced HER-me-own.

haha, I'd never thought of that, but it's true :D

I have noticed a lot of (youtube) people are keenly aware of their faults. Admitting you have a thing to try improve up on, is an triple up that I can unfortunately only give as 1/3 of a triple agree. If you know you are butchering grammar/spelling, giving a pre-warning is only going to make it funny.

Sich a dumb word, but somehow I never really clicked on this word: "question". I have spoken the word a lot, but somehow I practiced speaking english less when I moved away from my parents to study. English became more of a read and written language than spoken, so the words became just things to read, not to sound out loud.

After attempting to speak a bit more english again, words were drawn from memory by how they were written. And for some reason the word "question" was incredibly weird. "Kuest-ion"? No, I'm sure there is a "ch"-sound in there. "Kwest-chien"?

I had to check out some youtube videos on pronounciation to get it right.

Mispronounced words by British people are unacceptable though. The Brits need to be stopped!

Kubernetes

I keep pronouncing "sweat" like "sweet", even though people keeps correcting me about it because my stupid brain is stuck with the wrong pronunciation

I used to think "chaos" had the same "ch" as "church" when I was a kid. Don't know why I never heard it spoken aloud by someone earlier than I did.

But the one that I find inexcusable is Southern US people who pronounce "jalapeno" with a "j" and "n" instead of an "ha" and "ñ" even though they know better. Sounds so willfully ignorant

I pronounced entrée as "entry" until I was in my 30s. 😭

I thought I was mispronouncing "duodenum" so I changed it, then I heard doctors on youtube saying it the way I thought was wrong. I had gone from right to wrong back to right. lol

Currently staying here for a week and I have no idea how to pronounce Etobicoke. I'm sure it's not "Et oh buy coke". I asked a couple of canadiens but that hasn't helped because what comes out of their mouth is so far removed from the spelling.

I wonder if by the same criteria the opposite also holds true. Are misspelled words dishonorable? And if yes does it matter if they're nouns or other functional words like there/they're/their ?

This happened to me.... The word was hyperbole. I said it as hyper bowl ee.

The kicker is I've heard the word hyperbole before, pronounced correctly, and never knew what it meant, nor how it was spelled.

So I spoke to someone who was a bit more linguistically inclined, both verbally and written (hes also older than me by a few years, and more "into" art and culture)... And he said "you mean hyperbole?" And everything finally clicked. At the time I was embarrassed because I knew both the written and pronounced versions of it, but never put them together, so I felt like it was something I should have been able to figure out on my own and didn't.

Now? If someone made the same correction to something similar, I'd be like. Ohhhhhh. That makes more sense. Thanks! Instead, I basically exited the situation to go die in private from embarrassment.

I should not have been embarrassed.

I love learning new things.

As a kid I used to pronounce amoeba as “a-MO-ba” instead of “a-MEE-ba”.

See holler, tow-up.

This happens to me a lot in the medical field. "Parenchymal" has been my most recent, and I have to think about it every time I hear it or try to say it

I read it in my head as PAIR-EN-KIME-AL, but it's pronounced PA-RINKA-MAL... though how I read it does help me to spell it

Some words I still can't pronounce, but I know how to "read", such as "klebsiella aerogenes"

While we're on the subject: "Tachypneic" is pronounced like "TA-KIP-NIK", but I never hear anyone try and pronounce "Bradypneic". One would assume that it's pronounced like "BRA-DIP-NIK" (or maybe "BRAY-DIP-NIK"), but I can't confirm. I think saying "bradypneic" intimidates people

Hysteresis got me.

Since we're on the topic there's this historical word that I haven't heard pronounced in English, Alexander the Great had a bunch of generals that were called the Diadochi, I haven't seen this term pronounced in English, but recently I've taken into account the way English speakers pronounce words and I was wondering if the way I'm pronouncing it in English is correct or if I am just wrong.

I've been pronouncing it in an English context as: "Die-a-Dough-key" I'm no linguist so I'm not sure how to write pronunciations sorry if it looks dumb.

Anyone remember the Eyjafjallajökull outbreak in Iceland?

I wonder how this works for logographic systems like Chinese, where the letter tells you nothing about the sound (though tbf English spelling is so bad that it's almost at that level too).

I was pronouncing "Byrne" like "buy-er-nie" until I saw someone who had that last name pronounce it like "burn". The way I was pronouncing it was as if I was excitedly saying "bye Ernie" 😂

I refuse to believe unscurpulous is pronounced in that goofy ass way. People say that in courtrooms goddamn it.

Suff-ice.

:(

Yosemite National Park

…or from my word-a-day calendar.

This feels like my Achilles heel sometimes

About 20 years ago when memes started appearing there was a site called memebase. I pointed it out to someone and he laughed at me for pronouncing it mêmebase because I speak french

Poutain 😂

My wife is Jewish. One day when she was very little, she and her mother were walking around the neighborhood and saw a Christmas wreath hanging somewhere. Having previously read the word in a book where it was spelled a lot like the word "breath," she asked her mother why they didn't have a "wreth" in their home.

In our household we now and forever pronounce it "wreth" on purpose because of how much I love that story.

This was me as a 7 year-old, reading The Hobbit and LotR. 33 years, and many rereads later, I still pronounce Gollum as golem and Smaug as smog.

When I was younger and listening to The Hunger Games, I thought the boy's name was Peter and my narrator just had an accent.

Yeaa... I totally learned skibidi rizz from a book...

I respect when people misuse meme formats that they've only had a verbal description of.

For me it's the word: ruffians

I still slip up and say roff-ians

Or you like to fuck with people.

Paprika? Pahp-reh-cah.

So you read books but can't use a dictionary?

Are people who learn via videos, audio media, or social interaction dumber?